My name is Jim Parks. I was a originally was a rifleman with the
Winnipeg Rifles on D-Day, and I ended up being a sergeant before the end
of the war, but during that time I participated in all the major battles
that our unit was in including Normandy, Caen, Carpiquet,
Leopold Canal, Nijmegen, carried on right through the coast right to Holland
and Germany and finished up the war in Germany in 1945.
When we actually landed on the beach was, we never ever practiced that the way.
We practiced different ways in Scotland and they decided to forget any of those ways
just just go in the way we were so that's we did. June the sixth, well what
they did with us, I was the mortar carrier, so we were in a landing
craft tank and our our time the landing was H -2. H-hour is the time of where our
assault landing craft for the infantry to come in, minus two that we're supposed to land
two minutes ahead of time, but our boat, we had, they dropped us off in water too
deep and our mortar carriers went into the water, and we ended up swimming.
On the way there, I was trying to swim into shore, I got sideswiped by one of the
landing craft come in, and you get pushed into the water and all I could see was
stars because I swallowed a lot of water right, and you see stars and you know
my foot touched the, touch the bottom and give you a little jump and popped up, and I
started a little started to wing my way into the water, into the shore. The orders
were that that boat, every boat that went ashore in that first waves or so, to ram
the beach so they wouldn't have to be in the water, but he didn't do that. We got
dropped off too soon otherwise we wouldn't have got wet, would had all our
stuff, but everything we had was stuck on the boat.
Our officer came in about, I guess about 12 or 15 minutes later. He'd come in, a lot happens in the short
period of time there, you know. Pull the guys out of the water and all that
sort of stuff because we wouldn't have done that unless the firing had stopped
on the beach, and we had nowhere to go because we'd lost everything anyway so,
he pulled the guys that were some of the guys were hit in the water, pulled them
out of the water and what we worried about the tanks are going to come in, and
tanks may run, they wouldn't see the bodies they would just run right over.
So we pull as many as we could as far as we could. Once we started doing that a few of the
other guys did too that lost their stuff, but the main infantry companies, they had
pushed forward already, they'd already push forward to the next objective.
We were moving forward to a village called Putot. That's uh, that was
on what they call the the Oak Line. This is the objective when the Canadian
Army went through, they said as an objective were to reach for the D-Day,
and they draw a line on the map and they call it a line; Oak Line.
That was the Oak Line, so when we got the Putot, that was part of the Oak Line, and
so we were all dug in there. The wheat was around about three or four feet high,
so in the afternoon of the the seventh of June the
Germans had infiltrated so when the evening come they were fully
infiltrated all around the companies and between the 7th and 8th of June we had
three companies decimated because the Germans had infiltrated among, and a lot
of the people got out but, we lost over 256 people killed wounded or captured in that time.
The sacrifices made by our generation,
the benefits are for this generation. This is what I feel. You don't think
about that way at the time, you're just in there to do your job and to, to
survive that's what you're there for yeah.